Deacon George Dardess at Nazareth College in Pittsford, New York, last May.

Becoming a Roman Catholic deacon led me into Islam—not by embracing
Islam itself, but by embracing it as a sign of the Other whom the deacon
has come to serve. The path has been so full of surprises that I can
truly say, “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

Yet it’s not only as a deacon that I speak of Islam. I also speak
of it as an ordinary American who one day realized that he knew nothing
about this “foreign” religion: nothing of its holy book, the Quran,
nothing of its teachings, the people who embraced it, their languages
and cultures or even the countries where Muslims live. For example, I
couldn’t at that time have found Iraq on the map.

The change began in February 1991. I had been watching with horror
televised reports of our first Iraq war, “Desert Storm.” As a recently
baptized (1983) Catholic Christian, I had absorbed Thomas Merton’s
writings on nonviolence; I had been inspired by the U.S. bishops’ 1983
pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace. I also felt deeply that
Desert Storm was portrayed unjustly: as a triumphant exercise of
American goodness over the darkest evil and a war that had been cleansed
of its violence through “surgical strikes” and “smart bombs.”

Much as I wanted to, however, I could not demonize the war makers.
What restrained me was a painful consciousness that I was complicit in
my ignorance. This war had been allowed to go forward, I believed,
because people like me, who ought to have known something about Islam
and the Muslim world, knew nothing. Because of that, we were easy
victims of the propaganda that made killing Iraqis, both soldiers and
civilians, a smoothly justifiable action, almost a sacred duty.

To ease my conscience, I said out loud as my wife, Peggy, and I
watched videos of American missiles presumably hitting precisely focused
Iraqi targets (while avoiding all civilians): “I’m going to learn
Arabic.” I said these words a bit braggingly, as if just saying them
aloud would make a difference. But I said them fearfully as well,
because something warned me that fulfilling this promise would change my
life.

I delayed as long as I could. But finally, one fall day in 1993, my
excuses and evasions dried up. When I began a course in Arabic at
Rochester’s Islamic Center, I entered a different world. As I had feared, that short step changed me.

I became different, first of all, because within the space of five
minutes I left behind a world where Muslims had been a scary,
undifferentiated mass and entered a new world where Muslims were human
beings with distinct names, bodies, personalities and histories. Moving
beyond a world of stereotypes, I entered flesh-and-blood human reality.

The change began once I had taken off my shoes, put them in a
cubbyhole and padded upstairs to the classroom. From knowing no Muslims
for the first 50 years of my life, I suddenly knew 30—the 30 class
members gathered on that fall day to learn Arabic.

Only one fifth of Muslims are native Arabic-speakers. The rest have
to learn their faith’s language slowly and painfully, just as I was
doing. My new Muslim friends and I were suddenly linked together in a
common struggle. Besides sharing a desire to learn, we shared a common
humanity.